Lucien Bourjeily retains a sense of humour. It's an important attribute for a playwright taking on Lebanon's censors.

Earlier this year, Bourjeily, an internationally acclaimed writer and director who dazzled the London International Festival of Theatre 2012 with his immersive work 66 Minutes In Damascus, wrote a play about Lebanese censorship. “Would It Pass Or Not?”, produced by anti-censorship group March, addresses the question every Lebanese writer and artists asks themselves before sitting down to begin a work.

Lebanon is a country battling to keep a lid on sectarian tensions, and eternally caught up in other people's wars. Censorship is seen as a national security issue, and overseen by the army.

Like so many modern blue-pencillers, the Lebanese Censorship Bureau insist that it is only protecting citizens. There is, says Bourjeily, quite a bit of sympathy for this argument in the country.

So Bourjeily decided to tackle the topic head on and write not about the many sensitive issues in Lebanon but about the censors themselves.

Suspecting that the answer to “Would it pass or not?” would be an emphatic “not”, he and his company sought to exploit a loophole, performing their play on university campuses to invited audiences rather than in public theatres. The censors still pursued him. Two officers from the bureau turned up at a university show and broke up the performance. Bourjeily decided he would try to test the censor's decision.

In conversation with Index, Bourjeily told of his bizarre encounters with the censor board's general. He was summoned to the bureau in Beirut on 28 August.

The play cannot go ahead, he was told, because it was not realistic. It was exaggerated.

True, Bourjeily says. It's fiction. Of course it's unrealistic and exaggerated. Otherwise it would be a documentary.

The general turns to his subaltern and describes scenes from the play, asking “would such a thing happen here?”, unintentionally and ironically echoing a scene in the play itself. When censors are censoring a play about censorship, things are bound to turn to farce sooner or later.

Normally, Lebanon's censors will suggest changes to works that will allow them to pass – a joke removed here, a political remark erased there. But with Bourjeily's play, this was apparently not going to happen.

The censors' next move was interesting: they would show, they said, that Boujeily's play had no artistic merit. On 3 September, General Mounir Akiki appeared on television bearing testimony from four “critics”, each of whom said the same thing; that there was no artistic value in “Would it pass or not?”. Curiously, none of these critics were named, but their views were taken very seriously indeed. One said that Bourjeily's play were “with a defamatory hallucination indicating the absence of his artistic level”, another that the play “was not related to the theatre, but rather with prosaic words and it does not meet the conditions regarding the structure.”

It's a familiar ruse; if it's not art, it's not artistic censorship; if it's rubbish, who would want to see it anyway?

In this, the censors echoed the notorious, and in hindsight ridiculous, court hearings over Lady Chatterley's Lover in Britain in 1960 , the crux of the argument being whether the book was actually literature or mere obscene pornography. Great lengths were gone to by intellectuals such as Richard Hoggart to prove that Lady Chatterley's Lover was literature, and thus, perhaps something one might wish your wife or your servants to read, at least if you were an enlightened sort of chap.

This is always what censorship of works of art comes down to: someone, be it the colonels, the Lord Chamberlain or whoever else: who is to decide what you can read, what you can write, what ideas you can process. As the late Christopher Hitchens observed in a speech at the University of Toronto in 2006, if given the choice, would you nominate someone for that role? Or would you think you'd take your chances with your own intellect?

Lebanese writers and theatregoers are deprived of that option every day.

The lack of a comprehensive legal framework for privacy rights and data protection in Lebanon has led to the adoption of illegal mass surveillance programs and to the violation of individual and collective privacy without repercussions

This "LGBT Censorship in Lebanon" report tackles the impact of censorship, unequal treatment and the arbitrariness of legislation on the daily lives of the Lebanese LGBT Community and more generally all LGBT-related content in Lebanon.

In this report we take a closer look on how a traditionally safe space for free speech and expression was transformed into a space of unregulated arbitrary legal practices. We also examine the effect that the ever-changing political objectives, affiliations and temporal objectives all have on the frequency and severity of online political censorship cases.

Covering women’s issues does not come without danger. A female editor was murdered for denouncing a sexist policy. A reporter was imprisoned for interviewing a rape victim. A woman reporter was physically attacked for defending access to tampons, while a female blogger was threatened online for criticizing a video game. For International Women’s Day, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) wants to turn the spotlight on violence against journalists covering these issues. This report does not address the status of women journalists, equal employment of women in journalism or sexist (or non-sexist) attitudes in the media. These issues have been widely covered and debated elsewhere. This report focuses specifically on threats and violence against both men and women reporters covering women’s rights.

This "LGBT Censorship in Lebanon" report tackles the impact of censorship, unequal treatment and the arbitrariness of legislation on the daily lives of the Lebanese LGBT Community and more generally all LGBT-related content in Lebanon.

In this report we take a closer look on how a traditionally safe space for free speech and expression was transformed into a space of unregulated arbitrary legal practices. We also examine the effect that the ever-changing political objectives, affiliations and temporal objectives all have on the frequency and severity of online political censorship cases.

Combining both violent and nonviolent methods, the Communist Party's policies are designed to curb the rapid growth of religious communities and eliminate certain beliefs and practices, while also harnessing aspects of religion that could serve the regime's political and economic interests.

Many journalists increasingly practice self-censorship, fearing retribution from security forces, military intelligence, and militant groups. Media outlets in 2016 remained under pressure to avoid reporting on or criticising human rights violations in counterterrorism operations. The Taliban and other armed groups threatened media outlets and targeted journalists and activists for their work.

After already cracking down on freedom of information in recent years, President Erdoğan has taken advantage of the abortive coup d’état and the state of emergency in effect since 20 July to silence many more of his media critics, not only Gülen movement media and journalists but also, to a lesser extent, Kurdish, secularist and left-wing media.

This publication presents the findings of the media development assessment in Mongolia that began in 2012 to determine the state of the media in the country. The assessment was based on the UNESCO/IPDC Media Development Indicators (MDIs), an internationally recognized analytical tool used to provide detailed overviews of national media landscapes and related media development priorities.

Violence against journalists in Europe increased in the second quarter of 2016, reports submitted to Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom platform show, as a government crackdown in Turkey intensified and protests turned violent in countries from France to Finland.

“After the initial optimism during the Euromaidan movement, many journalists have become disillusioned. They are faced with the triple challenge of the war in the Eastern part of the country, the economic crisis and the digitalization of mass media.”

An officer of the Myanmar army recently filed a criminal complaint against two journalists for allegedly sowing disunity among the military. Even though mediation by the Press Council caused the military to withdraw the case, this incident demonstrates how the military continues to throw its weight to get back at what it perceives as negative publicity.

In recent years, the space afforded to civil society to operate freely has been shrinking dramatically across the world, presenting a serious threat to democracy and human rights. Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) have been especially badly affected by this shrinking political space.

The report is a frank assessment of the recent regime of online censorship and mass surveillance against a backdrop of longstanding, serious abuses of the judicial process and attacks on freedom of expression by Turkish authorities.

The report surveys the rocky landscape for media and public discourse since the ruling military junta lifted the curtain on the southeast Asian nation in 2012 after five decades of isolation from the modern world.

Despite its Constitutional commitment to free speech, India’s legal system makes it surprisingly easy to silence others. Routine corruption, inefficiency, and the selective enforcement of vague and overbroad laws allow individuals, or small groups, to censor opinions they find distasteful. - See more at: http://www.pen-international.org/the-india-report-executive-summary-and-key-findings/#sthash.TIIM2xbu.dpuf

As Globe International Center (GIC) reported, from 2012-2014, violations against journalists and the media increased compared to previous years and journalists faced external threats and intervention in their professional work, different types of pressures, threats, censorship in distribution, demands to reveal their information sources, to question and give testimony in mass by law enforcement bodies, especially by the General Intelligence Agency, use of criminal defamation law by politicians and public bodies or public officials censoring the media.

As the election looms for later this year, incidents in 2014 and in early 2015 involving the press raises serious questions on the genuineness of media freedom in Burma. The situation is alarming as the state seems to have heaped all the faults and fines on the media in the past year, which has seen a media worker being killed in October on the pretext of national security. International assistance has poured into the country to develop the media aimed at lifting and sustaining the state of media freedom. However, a viable press freedom environment seems unlikely to materialise in Burma before the end of this administration.

The media in Tripura is still dependent on the government for financial help, giving them an unprecedented upper hand to control press freedom in the state. As long as the political party in power is satisfied, the media is deemed to be okay otherwise there is an incredible pressure on the journalists as they have to not only endure insults but also face demotion in rank as well as being refused accreditation. - See more at: https://samsn.ifj.org/media-in-north-eastern-state-of-tripura/#sthash.0GypROMb.dpuf

There are far too many countries where news and content providers constantly face a very special and formidable form of censorship, one exercised in the name of religion or even God. And with increasing frequency, this desire to thwart freedom of information invokes the hard-to-define and very subjective concept of the "feelings of believers."

From August 28 to October 15, 2014, PEN American Center carried out an international survey of writers1 , to investigate how government surveillance influences their thinking, research, and writing, as well as their views of government surveillance by the U.S. and its impact around the world.

IFEX publishes original and member-produced free expression news and reports. Some member content has been edited by IFEX. We invite you to contact [email protected] to request permission to reproduce or republish in whole or in part content from this site.

Get more stories like this

Sign up for our newsletters and get the most important free expression news delivered to your inbox.